All memos tagged #aeo

!The Rise of Content Engineering — Eoin Clancy (AirOps) Eoin Clancy is the VP of Growth at AirOps, a company that helps brands get found in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Before joining...

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so it becomes the extracted, cited answer inside AI answer engines and search features — Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT,...

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing content for inclusion and citation inside generative AI outputs — the synthesized responses produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity,...

Structured data is markup that tells search engines and AI systems what a page is. The authoritative rules for it come from a small set of primary sources, not from third-party studies. Adding it to...

ChatGPT citation rate is 58% at retrieval position 1 — dropping to 14% by position 10. A mediocre page at rank 1 outperforms a great page at rank 6+. Rank overrides content quality every time. Domain...

The metrics built for search no longer measure what search actually does. Organic click-through rates on queries with AI Overviews dropped from 1.76% to 1.01% between June 2024 and September 2025....

We ran a controlled experiment in early 2026 to answer one question: if you serve AI crawlers Markdown instead of HTML, do they visit your pages more often? We tested 381 pages across six websites...

There is a chart inside the Morning Consult AI Trust Report that almost nobody is talking about, and it may be the most important thing published about AI adoption this year. It shows two lines...

This Is Not a Permanent State. Models Change. describes how brand-site citation share in ChatGPT responses shifts significantly across model versions, and why building for long-term credibility...

ChatGPT Cross-Checks Your Site Against Your Reviews describes the behavior by which ChatGPT reads a brand's owned site alongside external review sources in the same prompt and compares the two...

Who Actually Gets Cited in the Answer refers to the distribution of citation share across source types in ChatGPT responses, revealing a significant gap between brand-direct and open-ended query...

ChatGPT Query Phase Flow is a multi-stage web search sequence ChatGPT runs when answering questions with search enabled, where each call serves a distinct function and draws from a different...

Google Has Become Your Sales Agent describes the structural shift in how AI Overviews (AIO) have repositioned Google from a traffic referral engine into an active participant in the buyer journey,...

Branded Mentions Are the New Backlinks refers to the finding that brand mentions across credible platforms now correlate more strongly with AI search visibility than traditional SEO signals like...